Abstract
Washo, a Native American isolate, displays negative concord morphology in the context of negation. Negative concord in Washo comes in the form of the morpheme -Na, which may be suffixed onto optionally many sentential elements in a single clause. Given the apparent lack of semantic contribution by this morpheme, I argue - building on accounts along the lines of Zeijlstra (2004) - that negative concord in Washo is best treated as the result of multiple agreement between an interpretable Neg feature high in the clause and optionally many uninterpretable Neg features present on the items it c-commands. Importantly, the Washo data shed light on an unexplored system of negative concord and the possible range of agreement phenomena that are sensitive to negation.
Highlights
This paper concerns itself with an unfamiliar type of negative concord found in Washo, in which the suffix -Na occurs on optionally many sentential elements within the scope of negation
The negative concord suffix -Na in Washo presents a novel type of negative agreement marking that is best captured by an agreement analysis invoking Multiple Agree, along the lines of the proposal put forward by Zeijlstra (2004)
The Washo data presented in this paper are important in two ways
Summary
This paper concerns itself with an unfamiliar type of negative concord found in Washo, in which the suffix -Na occurs on optionally many sentential elements within the scope of negation. The examples in (1-2) illustrate this distribution by showing that -Na may appear on the object t’ag1m ‘pinenuts’ when the sentence is negated (1), and may not appear otherwise (2).. Negation in Washo is expressed by the suffix -e:s. (1) me:hu t’a:g1m -Na P- ́ıPiw -e:s -i boy pinenuts-NC 3/3-eat-NEG-IND ‘The boy didn’t eat pinenuts.’. (2) *me:hu t’a:g1m -Na P- ́ıPiw-i boy pinenuts-NC 3/3-eat-IND ‘The boy ate pinenuts.’
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